Change is inevitable. Adding new tasks to a project that has already been approved and baselined can be troublesome—to you and stakeholders. But don’t fret. You don’t need to set a new baseline to take into account the new tasks. Just update the old baseline. To modify the baseline that has already been set, do the following:

Select the new tasks that have been added recently to the project. This is important.

On the Tools menu, point to Tracking, and click Set Baseline.

In the Set baseline list, select the previously set baseline. It will have a date associated with it.

Here’s the tricky part. Make sure you select the Selected Tasks option. Otherwise, you’ll reset the baseline for the entire project.

Click OK.

One more thing: Make sure you communicate these changes to stakeholders, if necessary. Some people just don’t like surprises.

Exchange Integration provides the ability for team members on a project to view, update, delete and report status on their published tasks in Outlook, Outlook Web Access (OWA) or any other application that is capable of syncing tasks from Exchange Server.

This functionality replaces the Project 2007 Outlook add-in that allowed team member to report status on their tasks and report time against their timesheet. Even though the Exchange Integration feature does not provide the ability to report time against a timesheet, it provides a number of benefits over the Outlook add-in. A few examples of functionality that it provides over Outlook are:

Ability to report status from OWA

No add-on to deploy to the team member’s computer

Seamless integration with Outlook Tasks

One of the driving goals of this feature is to keep the task experience in Outlook the same for the team members. For us, this meant, that if a team member is familiar with working with Outlook tasks, they should easily transition to using tasks that are synchronized between Exchange and Project Server. Team members will find the same user interface used for Project tasks as they find with regular Outlook tasks, except for a custom Project Task ribbon which changes a few advanced options. Team members use the same interface to mark tasks complete, update their status and categorize their tasks as they would regular Outlook tasks. Also, all their tasks show up in their to-do lists, however, we sync the tasks into folders that are named by the project name the task belongs to, allowing the team member to quickly find tasks for a given project.

Lets walk through a simple example on how this feature works. Jack is a project manager and has a very simple plan, which involves myself to complete some tasks on his project plan. Just like Jack has previously assigned me work, he creates his plan and assigns me to the tasks that I need to complete, In this example, he has assigned me “Task A” and “Task B”. When Jack publishes the plan, the tasks show up in My Work, just like they do if we Exchange Integration is not enabled on the server. I can then go ahead and update my status on the My Work page in PWA, but in addition to the tasks being published to the My Work page, they also show up in Outlook and OWA because Exchange Integration is enabled for me:

From within Outlook or OWA, I am able to see the tasks assigned to me. They show up in my to-do list and in the calendar view:

In addition to showing up in these two places, I can also see a list of all the tasks I am assigned to for a given project:

I can easily go update properties on the task such as percent complete, actual/remaining work, and task name. All the tasks will sync to the team member’s mailbox, independent of the tracking mode. There is no way to enter time phased data in the Outlook task form, so users cannot enter the time phased data like they can in PWA, however the team member can still update the percent complete and actual/remaining work for the task and Project Server will make a best effort on updating the status on the task. When I make this changes, the tasks are automatically synchronized back to Project Server once the client connects back to Exchange Server. Updated tasks are automatically submitted for approval:

Next time Jack opens the project plan, he will see that I have made updates to the tasks assigned to me. At this point he can accept or reject update just like before. If the task update is accepted, the change is applied to the plan. If Jack chooses to reject the update, he can add a comment and it will show up in the notes field of the task for the team member to review.

In addition to updating properties on a task, the team member can create tasks for a project by creating a new task in the appropriate project folder or delete tasks. Both of these actions go through the approval process, just like the it would if the tasks were created or deleted from PWA.

In this release we have also added a new feature called Single Entry Mode (SEM). Patrick Conlan briefly described it in the blog post entitled “Time Tracking in Project Server 2010”. When SEM is enabled the task update data automatically flows into the Timesheet and onto the project plan wherever it is edited, until such time as the timesheet is sent for final timesheet manager approval. It is important to know that Exchange Integration continues to work when SEM is enabled.

The biggest question in project management is: How is my project going? The quickest way to learn this is to take a look at the Project Statistics dialog box in Project 2007. To get to this, on the Project Menu, click Project Information, and then click the Statistics button.

At a glance, you can find the following:

At the top, you can review start and finish dates for the currently estimated, baseline, and actual dates, as well as the variances.

At the bottom, you can review the current, baseline, actual, and remaining values for duration, work, and cost.

Now, wouldn’t it nice if doing your taxes and balancing your checkbook were this easy?

In Project 2010, we made a big update to AutoFilter in the client. Now from the column header you can sort, filter on, and group by the field. Essentially there are four zones:

Sorting: Depending on the type of field, you can sort alphabetically, numerically, or chronologically.

Group By: You can select to group explicitly on the field, or group on an interval specific to the field type. For example, for date fields this looks like:If you aren’t sure why to use group by, check out this post.

Filters: While you can easily use the checkboxes to select which values to display, the filter flyout allows you to do this more quickly based on the selected criteria.

Date Fields: Duration Fields:

Checkboxes: These allow you to select which values to display by simply checking/un-checking the values. For example, if I uncheck October then none of the task that start in October will be displayed.

AutoFilter is on by default in Project 2010. If you aren’t seeing it, you can turn it on by going to View tab – Filter dropdown – and selecting Display AutoFilter.

You can tell an AutoFilter is applied since the column header displays the funnel shape . Additionally, the Status Bar displays “AutoFilter Applied” and if you hover over it, you can see which fields are affected:

Join us to learn how you can utilize the powerful capabilities included in Project 2010. Obtain unique insights into how the next release will continue to support your business during the first in a 3 part series, delivered by Microsoft engineers and product managers.

Microsoft Project 2010 Webcast: Project 2010 Overview

Presenter: Keshav Puttaswamy, Group Program Manager, Microsoft

Date: Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Times: 7:00am – 8:00am PST and 6:00pm – 7:00pm PST

Register now for this session or one of these upcoming complimentary sessions:

As promised in our post where we introduced Web Based Editing, we now have a video to demonstrate the speed with which you can edit a large project in Project Web Access. This project has 6,300 tasks and, as you can see from the video, in just a few short seconds you can load the project and make edits to the plan. Just one of the many new features to look forward to in Project 2010.